Ebro Ahmed stops runaway school bus after driver's medical emergency

Saint Paul district said another bus brought 19 students home

Ebro Ahmed, 27, said he pulled the emergency brake on a runaway school bus in Saint Paul, Minnesota, after the driver had a medical emergency. Ahmed said he noticed the bus’s open door and foam coming from the driver’s mouth before sprinting to the vehicle and leaping through its doorway. Saint Paul’s public school district confirmed the emergency, said paramedics responded and said another bus brought the 19 students home.

During a break outside his family’s Ya Bricks Snacks and Tobacco store on Monday afternoon, Ahmed was kicking a soccer ball and scrolling on his cellphone when he saw a yellow school bus pass with its door flung open. Ahmed said he deduced that something was wrong after seeing foam come from the driver’s mouth; foam can be a symptom of a seizure.

According to Ahmed, he ran to the bus, leaped through the door and tossed his phone and glasses to two girls in the front to free his hands. He said his first thought was to see if he could shift the bus into park, but with frightened children screaming around him, he pulled the emergency brake. Ahmed said the bus stopped without anyone aboard or on the street being injured.

In a Friday statement, Saint Paul’s public school district said the medical emergency occurred outside Ahmed’s family store and required paramedics to respond. It said another bus picked up the 19 students and brought them home. The driver was resting at home after being brought to a hospital and discharged.

In an interview with The Guardian on Friday, Ahmed said the Qu’ran verse declaring that “whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity” entered his mind when he decided to intervene. He said, “I’m a numbers guy, and those numbers make sense to me.” He also said, “I didn’t do it for me. It was selflessness in the name of God.”

Surveillance cameras at Ahmed’s family store captured the footage of him running onto the runaway bus. The local news outlet KTSP obtained and published the video, which went viral alongside an interview KTSP conducted with Ahmed. In that interview, he credited the medical television drama Grey’s Anatomy with teaching him “what to do in situations that you could never see yourself in.”

The National Safety Council estimates that about 20.3 million children ride school buses across the US daily, a scale at which driver-related emergencies can occasionally occur. The Guardian said quick-thinking bystanders can often help avert disaster when such emergencies happen.

Ahmed, who said he was US-born, said his parents are immigrants from Eritrea and have found it challenging to run the store in Saint Paul amid federal immigration-enforcement activity during Donald Trump’s second presidency. According to Ahmed, business at the family store fell after federal immigration agents at the forefront of that effort arrived in Saint Paul and nearby Minneapolis as part of what the Trump administration called Operation Metro. “It’s been hard … as a small east African business,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed said he hoped the incident would show Eritreans “in a good way” and described feeling relief that it gave him an opportunity to portray Eritreans and east Africans the same way. According to Ahmed, a local marketing and media company donated $1,000 to him as a token of appreciation for his bus heroics in a presentation that involved a Superman performer and a novelty check. Ahmed said he had been invited to speak on at least one panel, had been contacted by a city council member who congratulated him, and had also received congratulations from an uncle in Europe after the uncle learned about the incident in the news.

He said seeing his story trend among Eritrean circles was particularly meaningful. “It makes me proud to be able to represent them in a good way,” Ahmed said.